At a low point in his fortunes, the Liberator sent an emissary to recruit troops in London. Philip Ziegler describes how their achievements were of various importance, but the flame of Simón Bolivar’s British Legion lives on.

In 1861 a young clergyman’s son arrived in British Guiana to oversee a sugar plantation. Over the next 30 years Henry Bullock’s letters home caught the texture of life in a remote backwater of Empire – though they don’t tell the whole story, as Gaiutra Bahadur explains.